Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025
An Anti-Ode to Adland, poem by Jonathan Cant.
An Anti-Ode to Adland
“By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself.
You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage.”
— American stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks
Worked her assets well…
Mad about Men, those cheap heels,
flattering sass puttin’ the “ass” back
in assassin (twice). Bang, bang:
a marketing markswoman
with self-conscious swing
of the hip flask bottle-blonde battleship
armed with gin and blood-red grin
hauling away like a real-life Joan Holloway:
hollow, wayward, and all that glitter,
she’s Global Chief of Kitty Litter.
Smirked her way up…
destined for something
(despite the crooked tooth)
a regular runaway stray
sneaking through windows
war-painted and clubbing at fourteen
(braces would’ve blown her cover),
the student body
voted her “Most Likely To”
and she did. Never a quitter,
she’s Global Chief of Kitty Litter.
Lurked her way up…
by sheer agency
through adland’s waist-land,
a cat o’ nine lives WIP-ing tails,
servicing accounts and sleeping rough,
living out of not-as-degradable
grey plastic shopping bags,
started in cl.ass.ifieds (like a renta who’s new in town)
excelled by moving a lot of column inches,
now the reality has just hit her:
she’s Global Chief of Kitty Litter.
Twerked her way up…
through the ranks—received with thanks,
ever ready to fake
and take one for the team
maybe even the whole team
until the messy end justifies the means
she’s just gone viral
making websites “sticky”,
promoted from Group Head, she is
simultaneously tasteless and bitter,
she’s Global Chief of Kitty Litter.
Perked her way up…
in the Mile High Club (swelling its members),
she has the Partners’ ears, in her lap, dancing,
male clients say “Cheers!”
for the top-and-bottomless
expense account—‘It’s Super Absorbent’—
just like her product,
you’ll always find her in the laundry at parties,
she’s quick to swallow
a hair of the dog that bit her,
she’s Global Chief of Kitty Litter.
Jerked her way up…
like an industry pro
massaging the facts,
packs a feral temper: mean as cat shit,
always worming her way out of it
with razor-sharp claws
she tests for “clumpability”
but, only when the crystals turn pink,
will you think you know where she’s been.
Waited. all. these. years. for a title to befit her.
And now she’s Global Chief of Kitty Litter.
© Jonathan Cant
Jonathan Cant is a writer, poet, and musician. He won the 2023 Banjo Paterson Writing Awards for Contemporary Poetry, was Longlisted for the 2023 Fish Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Flying Islands Poetry Manuscript Prize, and Commended in the W. B. Yeats Poetry Prize. Jonathan’s work has appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Verandah, Otoliths, Utriculi, and the Booranga Writers’ Centre’s fourW thirty-four.